Research

So I have decided to change my idea after hitting some dead ends with the last one. Matt gave me the challenge to try and find some other people that are moving out or in soon so I could shoot with them but I haven’t been able to do this. I have emailed a few estate agents and they replied saying I could not be given access to the lists of people that are moving house through them so I have had to give up on this idea. During another feedback session when I raised this to the group I was discussing what I should do next and multiple ideas were put forward which all linked back to my research and were focused in a similar ares to my last idea. One of these was to let my subjects choose what they wanted me to be photograph so they would be put across in a way that they were happy with. I had some time to think about this and I like the idea of the subjects choosing the objects that I focused on but I fret like the objects needed a bit more of a story and that there should be a reason why they could choose only one object for me to focus on. I then had the idea of people showing me the first things that they would move in to their new house if they were to move but most people that I spoke to said similar things like their bed or kitchen stuff etc.

I then had the thought of being able to ask people to think about what they one thing they would grab and save if there was a fire at their house. I have looked in to this idea further and thought about my research and it still fits in with it and my original idea I have just progressed it and made it more defined. I have found a blog site called The Burning House. This is an ongoing page that people can post on to and its all about what objects are most precious to people and what things they would save if there was a fire in their home. This is an interesting page as anyone can post on to it so their is a wide variety of people that have been involved in this project. This project has been going on since 2011 and is an open forum. Here are some examples from this project.

For my project I am still certain that I want to photograph the objects in the environments that they are in and I know that I want to focus on just one object for each person. This links to the other research that I have done and many of the decisions that I made than still stand now.

Here is a link to a survey that I created for my research for this assignment. This was so I could begin to gain an idea of what people thought about the space around their homes and if they would change what they had. This was so I could explore the idea of how much space people have has changed over time because of how their lives have changed.

The majority of people that took part in my survey lived in coventry and were happy with the area that they lived in, had an average amount of shared and private space near there home, and most people spent 0-30 minutes looking after this space.

This showed me what I predicted was right in that most people were happy with the space that they had as a lot of people didn’t really have the time to spend in this space caring for it e.g. gardening etc. This shows something about todays culture and society and the pressure that is on people to do other things rather than tend to their gardens for example going to work or rushing around after people instead of being in this space they have. This raises the question in me that if people are not caring for this space most of the time then could more houses be built on it and therefore enable the start of the reduction of the need for houses and calm down this ‘housing crisis’ that we are in.

Lewis Baltz is an American photographer he started photographing when he was young and became well known during the 1970s and was a leading figure in the new topographic movement. Baltz showed the viewer beauty in a minimalist form and in a fairly clinical way. Here is a short video of him talking about his work for the Tate,

Here are some photographs that have made me think about a different way to shoot when I go out and try to create images as they are very simple and minimalist photographs but are still very striking. I also think that the contrast used in these photographs is really effective and draws the eye in to certain points.

Some other photographers I have been introduced to in relation to my work are Bernd and Hilla Becher. These two photographers are married and worked together on projects, they are most well known for their Typologies work where they displayed grids of black-and-white photographs showing different examples of a single type of industrial structure. They would travel around and find the structure in multiple places photographing the major structures they found. This was mainly at mines where there was lots of big machinery. Along with these photographs the Bechers also took photographs of the landscapes these machines were situated in as a whole to show what it was like and the relation between everything they had photographed. Here are a few example of this work:

The Becher’s interests me because it is quite clinical and repetitive it causes you stay with the images for a while trying to take in the small differences between all the photographs in the grids which I think is interesting and how they make the viewer think about these machines/structures in a different way. This is what I want to do for my viewers.

The first photographer that I have looked at for this assignment is Mark Power he is a British photographer who was born in 1959 in Harpenden. He focuses a lot on structure and buildings, especially buildings that something is happening to e.g. being built or knocked down. When he was a child he found a home made enlarger that belonged to his dad in the loft so it has been said that photography was in his blood. He went to art collage and studied fine art, after leaving here he travelled around and found he increasingly enjoyed using the camera more than a pencil and some paper. He became known and since then he has been displaying his work in galleries and now teaches at the University of Brighton.

Here are some of his photographs from various projects that I have found interesting and that I think have some relation to my work.

These have influenced my thinking and how I am going to shoot because they show not only the main construction but the space as well which is something that I would like to show in my work for this assignment. His work is always linked to things that are happening at that time and are always showing a strong explanation and striking realisation of what is going on at that time. I also like the different view points Mark Power has taken these photographs from I like how the framing always draws the eye to one point and enables the view to focus on that. This is something that I am going to try and do in my photographs for this assignment.

After deciding what I was going to base this assignment on I started to explore what was involved in housing and the space that people have. I started initially by looking at problems with housing the main thing that came up when I searched for problems that linked to housing was the ‘Housing Crisis’ I found many newspaper articles from 2011-2013 about this ‘Crisis’. An awful lot of these were trying to find radical solutions for the problem of there not being enough housing for the ever-growing population of today’s world. One particular article from The Telegraph had the title of ‘The housing crisis doesn’t just need new homes, it needs new towns’. This is an example of one of these radical ways to fix what is happening.

I also found a counter argument to these drastic ideas of how to sort out this problem. It is that the space around homes and villages is important and that it should be protected as shared space for everyone to enjoy. I found out a lot of information from the CPRE (Campaign to Protect Rural England) website this had some good information on it especially about housing and the issues surrounding it other than just the fact that there isn’t enough. I decided to look more in to the idea of the rural land like green belts and found that this is increasingly trying to be used to prevent houses being built and taking up all the green spaces for people to go and roam around in. I think this idea of the space around people’s homes is interesting, the way they interact with that space and whether they use it or not and just leave it for others.